I Feel Pretty

Directed by Abby Kohn and Marc Silverstein

(PG-13)

2

A cracked-mirror view of ‘average’ looks

Reborn: Schumer with Sasheer Zamata

Amy Schumer, as a stand-up comedian and sketch performer, “has long been spot-on and ruthlessly funny about body issues and self-esteem,” said Michael Phillips in the Chicago Tribune. So, how to explain her now headlining in this two-faced, “weirdly scrambled” quasi-empowerment movie? Schumer plays an insecure cosmetics-firm employee who decides, after a bump to the head, that she’s as conventionally sexy as she’d always wished she could be. Unfortunately, because her confident new self repeatedly struts her stuff and attracts disdainful looks for doing so, “the movie is frankly depressing.” If I Feel Pretty offends, though, “it’s because of its blandness, not its political incorrectness,” said Aisha Harris in Slate.com. Schumer has made the same joke work, just not over and over again. Here, we can at least be thankful that the principle female characters don’t turn on one another, and that Michelle Williams is hilarious as a beauty-industry CEO with an absurdly girlish voice. Schumer pours so much energy into her role that “it’s hard not to feel charged up, too,” said Manohla Dargis in The New York Times. “But dear lord she needs to work with better material.”